From BlenderWiki

Guidelines

Please read through this document before reporting bugs for the 2.5 development.

Bug reporting

Blender 2.5 is a work-in-progress, almost all parts are now ready for testing and reporting. This section will clearly list the known issues (todo items) for which you don't have to report on yet, or which have already been reported, but moved to this todo list.

Also respect the bug reporting guidelines on the bug submission page! A good bug report tells the simplest way for someone else to reproduce the problem.

Roadmap

We are currently preparing the first official (non-beta) 2.5x release, numbered as 2.57. This might be released early April. Work will then continue 2 months on wrapping up the crucial 2.5 targets, resulting in a May/June final release (2.58).

In April/May we will review with all branch/patch developers status of their work, and make a migration schedule for all new features. This includes projects like GI rendering (Sintel), new Mesh editing, paint/sculpt improvements, Rigid Body Physics, new Curve/Nurbs system. Combining this with a redesign of shader/light system, Open CL compositing, a possible VFX based Open Movie, and all the new Google Summer code projects... it'll become a massive amount of upgrades again.

Proposal is to do this in a series of small steps; with stablest branches first. We can call it the "2.6 series" resulting in a number of releases named 2.60, 2.61, 2.62 and so on. Each release will be mostly stable, but include new functionality to be tested as well. UI and general design specifications for Blender will remain on 2.5 compatible level.

A related target or Blender remains to keep improving apis or modules, to enable larger groups of developers to work in parallel on projects.

What not to report

Keyboard shortcuts are mostly temporary at this point.

User expectations ("I would expect this to work...") - unless you have evidence it should work (it worked before, or code is supposed to work).